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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

We should consider another alternative - elite overproduction correlated with very wealthy societies, and very wealthy societies revert to the mean. So overproduction of elites correlates to decline, and correlation is not causation.

And attaching my pet theory - China has transformed their society, radically for the better, in 1 generation. As far as I can tell the American press has taken no interest whatsoever in seriously figuring out what happened beyond very surface level analysis. Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?

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>Are the policies that worked in Asia even serious contenders for implementation in America?

No. The US prioritises corporate profit over everything else - even to the point of sacrificing its hegemony.

China just wants to be powerful.

China realized a long time ago that that is the American achilles heel and exploited it by creating long term economic dependency on them in exhange for short term profit.

Wow, really well said. I think that's the clearest way I've heard this idea expressed on the US v China competition

China is doing the Marshall Plan in Africa. We in USA can't even improve our own country, let alone another nation.

China implemented capitalism. This lifted millions out of poverty. Capitalism is profit driven. I'm not sure what you mean.

It's only the last 10 years of China's economy that sparks interest/fear/competition in western minds and often the press is slow to pick up that something is different.

The Soviet Union, and Japan both threatened U.S. economic hegemony, but ultimately saw growth stagnate when the economy ran out of people to throw at the growth engine.

China is starting to look like they can keep the growth engine running even in the industrialized city centers, creating new products and services which rival their western counterparts. If this continues then China could reasonably rival the US and EU on both standard of living as well as total economic power.

China has a lot of challenges coming up in the future that is slowing that growth now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY

It's making the CCP jittery, which is a theory behind the increasing authoritarianism in the country now.

Which is ironic because letting the leash out is what has caused the rise of China. A Maoist China would not be an economic powerhouse

Think more like Mussolini than Mao. China is more like a fascist state than a communist one

There are many wealthy societies that keep growing instead of declining, and many poorer societies that get stuck in a trap and decline. That's the billion-dollar question wrt. China that nobody knows the answer to: will they keep growing and reach a Western-like standard or will they fail to pursue the reforms they would need and get stuck with a middling average income, like so many countries in South America today?

As for the policies that worked there - Deng Xiaoping said "black cat, white cat, if it catches mice it's good cat". But today the popular thing in America is to talk a lot about the ideology of being black or white, and just forget about that catching mice thing.

> reach a Western-like standard

implying that this is the pinnacle? May be it is possible that they blaze a new way. May be it is possible that they remain as they are, for extended periods of time, or become the next super power.

China’s economic development (and East Asia’s more broadly) has been one of the most thoroughly studied topics in development economics.

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